SOURCE: "The Prairie in Literary Culture and The Prairie Style of Frank Lloyd Wright," in The Nature of Frank Lloyd Wright, edited by Carol R. Bolon, Robert S. Nelson, and Linda Seidel, The University of Chicago Press, 1988, pp. 173-85.

"My dear and honored Walt Whitman," Louis Sullivan began the letter of February 3, 1887, in which he introduced himself to the poet. When he read Leaves of Grass, he told him, "you then and there entered my soul, have not departed, and will never depart."¹ The democratic faith of Whitman, it seemed, would be justified by the art of the Midwest where it could be embodied, free of the older patterns of the colonial past from which popular democracy was never quite separate on the Atlantic seaboard. So great was Whitman's influence on Sullivan's ideas that in his study of Sullivan Sherman Paul felt it appropriate to head his chapters with titles taken from Whitman: "Starting from Paumanok"; "Democratic Vistas"; "A Backward Glance."

But although Frank Lloyd Wright also admired the Whitman of democratic optimism and organic style directly as well as, it may be assumed, reflexively during his fruitful association with Sullivan, it would not be good judgment to parallel his career with epigraphs from Leaves of Grass. Despite his genealogical credentials from New England and some childhood years spent there, Wright springs undeniably from Wisconsin. When the poetic mood is on his prose, as it frequently is, it is the mood of the Welsh bards rather than of Whitman. Like those of the Celtic chanters, the exhortations in Wright's prose are also dappled with obscurities. The play of light and shade is not confined to his buildings.

Yet Whitman does supply the most striking similarity that American literature affords to Wright's work. Although it is not my intention to center on parallels between literature and architecture—a subject beyond my knowledge and also, I suspect, one that is vulnerable to all sorts of well-meant misrepresentations—before I come to my central concern, that of the literary perception of the prairies against which Wright's Prairie style asserted itself, some sense of Whitman will not be amiss. Whatever his specific influence may have been in the latter decades of nineteenth-century America, Whitman's was the only literary voice that insisted that the opportunity which the American West once symbolized—the establishment of the community of democratic brotherhood—was still possible to realize despite the setbacks of the Civil War, the rise of caste if not classes in an industrializing society, and the corruption of political processes by the pirates of finance. Henry James chose to focus on Americans only after they had emerged from native ground onto a finer soil, and Mark Twain saw them, increasingly saw all mankind, as different in kind from the truths they proclaimed. But Whitman took them for the promise they represented.

If Whitman alone sounded the optimistic note convincingly, it was because of the way he said what he said, not because of the message itself. The truth he proclaimed was validated not by the facts—he spoke a good deal about promises rather than fulfillment—but by his demonstration. If America represented the arrival of new values—the death of hierarchy and the establishment of the dignity of the common man—then it represented also the death of the old art forms and the arrival of new forms generated by the new values.

I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy,

Whitman announced in his first masterpiece,² signifying that he wished to bring into consciousness the great primal resource which underlay all life and art but which traditional art had formalized out of existence. He did not, therefore, offer poems, but promised his reader that if he stopped with the poet he would "possess the origin of all poems" (1. 33). To read the words of Leaves of Grass was to be enabled rather than informed, to become a poet rather than to remain an audience.

Whitman thus attempted to move Americans out from the delusions which had arisen from cultures that denied the democratic principle and to locate them in a radical awareness of the reality they inhabited. In the process, his imagery characteristically associated buildings with dead forms and the out-of-doors with American reality:

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
  I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
  The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

(11. 14-20)

It is tempting, treacherously so, to label this manner organic. Certainly in the presence of Whitman's poems we feel that the spill of words, which visually defy margins and refuse to arrange themselves in the black-and-white architecture of the sonnet or the heroic couplet, represents the striving of meaning to find signifiers and of signifiers to extend themselves to whatever shape is necessary for them to arrive at full signification. But beyond this, questions arise which trouble the simple notion of organic. Is the written word not different in kind from the spoken? Are the seemingly artificial forms in which poetry is arranged inorganic if they assist the signifier to signify? In the light of such questions, it is prudent to suggest that what Whitman liked to call his swimming shapes also have their form, a form which in its seeming formlessness may be called the convention of the organic, just as Mark Twain's colloquial style may be called the convention of the colloquial, actual talk being far more repetitious and inconsequential than the literary similitude he constructs to stand for it.³

Still, the impulse that propels Whitman is a pulse that throbbed in the American Romantic period, but which he alone maintained toward century's end. In 1852, for example, three years before the first edition of Leaves of Grass, the Yankee sculptor Horatio Greenough published his manifesto:

By beauty I mean the promise of function.
By action I mean the presence of function.
By character I mean the record of function.⁴

Yet in response to whatever constraints, Greenough himself sculpted Washington in a toga, engaged, that is, in what a disappointed Emerson called a futile endeavor to revive dead forms.⁵ Whitman, however, frankly and fully acknowledged a social function for his poetry and throughout the century continued to be a symbol—an increasingly lone one as decades passed—of the coherence of nature, democracy, the United States, and a new art.

The idea of the American West was central to this faith. There was, all agreed, something more American about the West. "The damned shadow of Europe," as Hawthorne called it,⁶ had not fallen over the plains, and from that region, it was to be expected, democracy's true voice would speak through an art which took its clues from limitless space and the voice of nature speaking from its midst, unfiltered by human conventions. Yet while writers spoke often of the westerners who were destined to fulfill the promise of the nation, the great works of the 1850s were neither by westerners nor about the West, except as it stood on the margin as a place in the imagination. Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville were centered elsewhere even when they departed from the literal settings of their native regions. Whitman's celebration of the outdoors insofar as it invoked the plains was just that, an invocation of a rising region of the mind rather than a rendering of the life that was taking shape on it.

This is hardly surprising since the plains were not yet settled and so furnished scant material for arts dependent upon lived life and the social values that emerged from it. And yet it is remarkable because in the period immediately prior to the great outburst of literary creativity in the 1850s, when Cooper, Bryant, and Irving occupied the stage as America's three most distinguished men of letters, the prairies were such a powerful presence in the culture that each of them not only wrote about them but even titled a major work after them. In 1827 Cooper published his novel The Prairie; in 1833 Bryant published his poem "The Prairies"; and in 1835 Irving published his narrative A Tour on the Prairies. The absence of similar attention among the next generation of writers, therefore, is not so much an indication of the prematurity of the subject as it is of a collapse of interest in it.

The word "prairie" first entered literary English when Sir Thomas Browne used it to describe the grassy savanna of Provence. The term crossed the Atlantic in 1778 when its first printed appearance was in application to the grasslands of Virginia. In 1787 it appeared in an English work concerned with the region we now call the prairies, doubtless prompted by the early penetration of that territory by the French from whom the word was taken. The word became increasingly common in English as the landscape it denoted came under the control of English-speaking America after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Political and economic curiosity ran high, and explorers' accounts soon sprang up to feed it. Not too long after, writers began the literary exploration of its cultural potential.

Bryant's 124-line poem, "The Prairies," is a model of the conventions that were adapted to encompass the new subject matter. It begins:

These are the gardens of the Desert, these
The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful,
For which the speech of England has no name—
The Prairies.⁷

The originality of the challenge they present to the imagination is most immediately signaled by the observation that England—not English—has no name for them; the very term in English is uniquely American. The more precise nature of their uniqueness as well as the way in which that uniqueness is to be comprehended imaginatively is captured in a phrase which was to reecho through the century, "gardens of the Desert," an oxymoron of controlled growth and emptiness, human endeavor and divine creation, which is rephrased throughout the poem, as in the term "verdant Waste" (1. 35) in the following stanza.

The thrust of Bryant's contemplation of this awesome phenomenon is to reduce it to human scale without trivializing its wondrous features. Although the prairies possess characteristics conventionally associated in aesthetics with the sublime—they are like the ocean; man has no part in the glorious work but they come directly from God's hand—Bryant resists the upward movement toward the sublime and works to comprehend his subject within the less rarefied category of the beautiful. So, for example, after seeing the prairie as a fitting floor for the magnificent temple of the sky, with flowers "whose glory and whose multitude / Rival the constellations!" (11. 29-30), he checks the rise toward pure awe and curves it downward to a human scale:

The great heavens
Seem to stoop down upon the scene in love,—
A nearer vault, and of a tenderer blue,
  Than that which bends above our Eastern hills.

(11. 31-34)

That downward curve initiates the next movement of the poem, which is a consideration of the prairies as the scene of a social life that is now extinct. Taking up the popular notion that the Mound Builders whose barrows yet stood were a people separate from the North American Indians of his day racially as well as chronologically, he paints a picture of the prairies' past when an agricultural people harvested their crops, tamed the bison to the yoke, and

Heaped with long toil, the earth, while yet the Greek
Was hewing the Pentelicus to forms
  Of symmetry, and rearing on the rock
  The glittering Parthenon.

(11. 47-50)

A "forgotten language" (1. 56) had once domesticated the desert, and the verdant waste the poet now beholds is not, after all, primal, but a second growth, the mighty grave of a cultured people overwhelmed and annihilated by the "warlike and fierce" (1. 59) red man. The prairie wolf and the gopher, like the Indian, are not original occupants of the scene, and the waste is humanized by its dead and fertilized to yield another social harvest. The poem's closing, then, can see the prairies which are now quick with the life of insects, flowers, and "gentle quadrupeds, / And birds," (11. 105-6) as the inevitable site of another agricultural people, and the poet dreams of this:

Comes up the laugh of children, the soft voice
Of maidens, and the sweet and solemn hymns
Of Sabbath worshippers. The low of herds
Blends with the rustling of the heavy grain
Over the dark brown furrows.

(11. 117-22)

Different as his Prairie is from Bryant's "Prairies," Cooper nevertheless shares with Bryant a concern with the literary strategy that will comprehend this unique phenomenon and a belief that that strategy is best developed in terms of the society that will live on the prairies, even though the period in which his fiction is set precedes such settlement. While Cooper is more given to stressing the sublimity of the vacant wastes than Bryant, at the same time as a novelist he is in need of social life. So he cannot merely dream of the future but must, at the risk of losing all probability, introduce onto his prairies a cast of characters who represent civilized society, in addition to the trapper and the Indians, even though fully half of the members of this assemblage have no real business being where he puts them. As a result, to the extent that he is open to the sublime he is also vulnerable to bathos.

Two remarkable death scenes close the novel, and while one may make the general observation that no literary convention is a trustier supplier of closure than death, still, in The Prairie the deaths assume a function peculiar to the problem of the setting itself. Bryant needed to feel the presence of the dead before he could comprehend the prairies as an appropriate site for the living. Cooper, eschewing the Mound Builders myth, leaves his scene as vacant of social life at the close as he had found it at the opening, save that it is marked by two graves. In one lies a man of mythic stature, the first white man to traverse the region, whose gifts blend the natural rhythms of the land to the sensibilities of civilization. In the other lies the first white man to commit willful murder on the prairie and that against a member of his family. Symbolic Adam and symbolic Cain provide the landmarks for the society to follow; without death there is no life.

As Henry Nash Smith has shown, Cooper's view of the West does advance significantly beyond that of his peers in one important respect.⁸ He introduces Ishmael Bush as representative of the class of rude husbandmen scarcely emerged from the hunter state who will first plow the prairies, and he employs him to symbolize the necessarily coarse life preliminary to culture. However, he uncovers in him a moral sublimity that is not to be attributed to the kind of refined sensibility his novels, including The Prairie, consistently assert to be the property of civilization and thus the justification for the conquest of the wild. Bush's power is primal. He embodies the notion that the prairies shape human culture to their own standard of unlicensed truth rather than exist in order to be shaped by socialized versions of truth. The notion is isolated in the character of Bush and is at war with the thematic values Cooper more explicitly maintains, but it remains as a buried message, available to those who will exhume it.⁹ In the context of the 1830s, however, Ishmael Bush was an exception, a character who momentarily escaped from the restraints of the conscious mind. As his name indicated, he was to be read more conventionally as another formulation of the oxymoron governing the conceptualization of the prairies: Ishmael, a wanderer; Bush, a rooted plant.

"We send our youth abroad to grow luxurious and effeminate in Europe," Washington Irving wrote in his Tour on the Prairies, "it appears to me that a previous tour on the prairies would be more likely to produce that manliness, simplicity, and self-dependence most in unison with our political institutions."¹⁰ His prairies are a finishing school which the civilized should attend, a reenforcer of a democratic culture but not its generator. Those who actually reside on the prairies are not as a result manly, simple, and self-dependent, but are characterized, rather, as a "rabble rout of nondescript beings that keep about the frontier between civilised and savage life; as those equivocal birds, the bats, hover about the confines of light and darkness" (p. 19). If we smile at the concluding pages of Irving's Tour, in which his party after a month's hunting sport on the prairies straggles back to the despised frontier in a condition so far from manly self-dependence that their survival depends upon their reaching a friendly farm before starvation overtakes them, the irony is lost on the author.

The prairies thus settled into the literary, which is to say the essentially eastern, imagination as a wild space awaiting a social life and a culture which would replicate the civilization of the Atlantic seaboard. Their appeal was greater in the promise than in the early realization, since the latter would for some while be marked by the nondescript beings of whom Irving wrote. Until the replication of the eastern town was accomplished, there was little to add to the tale told by Bryant, Cooper, and Irving. The writers of the remarkable generation which succeeded theirs focused on other matters. Left to the popular imagination, the prairies were pictured as the opposite of home, the negation of the enclosed and the snug. A microcosmic view of popular beliefs is afforded by the metamorphosis undergone by the poetic offering the Reverend E. H. Chapin published in The Southern Literary Messenger of September 1839. It was called 'The Ocean-Buried," and began:

"Bury me not in the deep deep sea!"
The words came faint and mournfully,
From the pallid lips of a youth, who lay
On the cabin couch, where day by day
He had wasted and pined.

11

The lad asks rather to be laid in the churchyard on the green hillside by his father's grave, near the home, cot, and bower where he was raised so that his mother's prayers and his sister's tears can attend his rest. In the event, however, the unfortunate youth is lowered over the ship's side, "Where the billows bound and the wind sports free."

Within ten years the poem had acquired a printed musical score. Twenty years on it was not much heard in the parlors of America, but something called a "traditional cowboy song" was. It began:

"Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie,"
These words came low and mournfully
From the pallid lips of a youth, who lay
On his dying bed at the close of day.¹²

Unsurprisingly, this youth wants precisely the same green hillside grave as the luckless sailor and for exactly the same reasons. Alas, he had no better luck, and

In a narrow grave just six by three
We buried him there on the lone prairie

The graves depicted by Bryant and Cooper continued to dot the prairies of the imagination, a landscape so devoid of human meaning that words about the ocean could be applied to it also.

And then came the flood of indignation. At the time of the Midwest's great announcement of its self-discovery in the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, a literary generation born on the prairies came into maturity and its theme was a double betrayal: the promise of the land betrayed by men—farmers, that is, betrayed by speculators; and the promise of men betrayed by the land—upright men coerced by labor to the stoop of beasts, and passionate women gone mad in shacks at the crossroad of the winds. Hamlin Garland, son of a westering Civil War veteran who homesteaded in Wisconsin, then Iowa, then South Dakota, only to go bust and backtrail to Wisconsin, sounded the keynote in Main-Travelled Roads (1891). The rudest stage of yeomanry had indeed succeeded the period of exploration, as earlier writers had predicted, but this was not followed by the New Englandy village of town green, trim houses, and bookish culture. Rather the home of toil was at one end of a road "hot and dusty in summer, and desolate and drear with mud in fall and spring," while in winter it was impassable, and at the other end was a town of shacks and tin.¹³ The poor and weary predominated. Such culture as there was preached profit and the sinfulness of art.

The fantasized replication of Americanized European civilization had not occurred because between the emergence of the farmer and the growth of the market town, finance capital had intervened. Whatever their geographical proximity, the road from farm to town led through the metropolitan offices of banks, railroads, and land companies. Their lives were not in the control of the prairies' inhabitants. Their culture could neither grow coherently from their relationship to the land nor could the values of traditional culture—the best that man has thought and done—find a home in their midst. The latter culture was to be sought in the metropolis where social stratification and patronage American-style made it possible. In the amused dissection of Columbian Chicago found in the fiction of Henry Blake Fuller, artists and reformers go after Chicago with a will, but regardless of their projects—a painting or a settlement house—the paths they follow to accomplishment lead through the drawing rooms of Mrs. Eudoxia Pence.

The resulting prairie culture appeared mean, drab, and blighted to its native sons and daughters, and they sought the conscious life in Boston, New York, and Chicago, the mizzen, main, and fore masts of the American ship of culture. There, like Garland, they soon became deracinated and grafted themselves to a culture alien to their upbringing even as they bewailed the degradation of their home soil which made this necessary.

Some ten years after the Prairie style in architecture had been fully articulated, Carol Milford of Minneapolis married a doctor from Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, and made her home there. Anticipating her new life, Carol planned to bring beauty to a town which, however drab it then appeared, was bordered by lakes and flowed into a boundless prairie. But she seems never to have heard of the Prairie style, and the beautiful Gopher Prairie of her fantasy is Georgian. Her failure is a defeat at the hands of the powerfully corrosive culture of Gopher Prairie. But the narrative in which she lives is not called Carol Kennicott nor Gopher Prairie, but Main Street. The title is both a tip of Sinclair Lewis's hat to Hamlin Garland, who led the literary revolt from the prairie, and a reminder that a Gopher Prairie may be found wherever there is an American town big enough to have a Main Street.

The Prairie style has sometimes been regarded as a misnomer, a label that helps to distinguish a unique and consequential architectural achievement, but only a label, not an accurate description. The houses were, after all, designed in Chicago and not built on the real prairie. Such reservations have been countered by the contention that the coming-of-age of the Midwest, although dramatized by the rise of Chicago, was nevertheless regional and so should be identified in terms of the region's characteristic topography. Wright himself said, "We of the Middle West are living on the prairie. The prairie has a beauty of its own and we should recognize and accentuate this natural beauty, its quiet level."¹⁴ Moreover, the effect of architectural space-in-motion not only blended inside and outside space but also captured a singularly potent feature of the prairies. Bryant in his poem, for example, had noted how still the prairies stood, only to add:

Motionless?
No—they are all unchained again. The clouds
Sweep over with their shadows, and, beneath
The surface rolls and fluctuates to the eye.

(11. 10-13)

The matter of greater significance is not whether the term Prairie style validly grows from other meanings of prairie, but whether that style once so named validly attached itself to the locale, made, as it were, the prairie its own. Of this there can be no doubt. Wright's Prairie style marked not only a major event in architectural history, it led to a major revision of cultural attitudes.

When we consider this revision in the context of the literary history of the prairie, we recognize that it is in good part a return to the outlook of the Romantic visionaries who had either little or no first-hand knowledge of the landscape. By Wright's day the real children of the prairie had lost the vision in pained reaction to the actuality. Also a native son, Wright transcended the actuality to embody what had only been vision for Bryant and Whitman.

Several years ago I took part in a symposium on the American Renaissance in art in connection with a show of paintings and artifacts from the period of 1878 to 1917. As now, my assignment then was to consider the literary context of the fine arts that formed the occasion. Then I was struck by how far in advance the writers were. The literary renaissance had preceded that in the fine arts by a quarter of a century; the painters were working in close cooperation with a patronage system which the writers of their day were exposing as the outgrowth of a social structure that denied the values that American literary artists had fought so hard to establish—denied what Whitman would have called American identity.

Now I am struck by quite the reverse. At a time when writers stood baffled and dismayed at the edge of the abyss which had opened between the promise of the prairies and the actuality of its culture and concluded that their literary task could only be a dismantling, a fellow artist, Frank Lloyd Wright, showed them the way to return to the dreamed-of ground and there to build.

NOTES

¹ Sherman Paul, Louis Sullivan: An Artist in American Thought (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 1.

² Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself," Leaves of Grass, ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett (New York: Norton, 1973), lines 12-13.

³ See, for example, Richard Bridgman, The Colloquial Style in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966).

⁴ Horatio Greenough, The Travels, Observations, and Experiences of a Yankee Stonecutter (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1958), 33.

⁵ Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, 16 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961-82), 5:150.

⁶ William Dean Howells, Literary Friends and Acquaintances (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 49.

⁷ William Cullen Bryant, "The Prairies," The Literature of America, 3 vols., ed. Irving Howe, Mark Schorer, and Larzer Ziff (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), 1:505, lines 1-4.

⁸ Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950), 220-24.

⁹ See, for example, two notable works of the 1920s: D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Doubleday, 1951), and William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (New York: New Directions, 1956).

¹⁰ Washington Irving, A Tour on the Prairies (London, 1835), 69.

¹¹ Reverend E. H. Chapin, "The Ocean-Buried," Southern Literary Messenger 5, no. 9. (September 1839): 615-16.

¹² "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie," Songs of the Great American West, ed. Irwin Silber (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 202.

¹³ Hamlin Garland, Main-Travelled Roads (New York: Signet, 1962), 12.

¹⁴ Quoted in Marcus Whiffen, American Architecture Since 1780: A Guide to the Styles (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969), 202.